Maximum Recipients per Message and exceptions

I just posted this article at our PFE site Mr. Proactive. Here’s the excerpt of the article:

While this is fairly documented on TechNet, it sometimes takes a bit to find and memory usually fails us when the question of precedence comes up. I figured documenting it here would help readers.

So the classic question of how to handle message size limits comes up very often and ever changing technology in pursuit of improvement never stays the same. This adds to the confusion of understanding the limits and the way they are applied across the organization. Also, it becomes challenging when you need to provide an exception.

Let’s take an example:

You have Exchange 2010 servers coexisting with Exchange 2003 servers. You have Maximum Recipient per message limit set to 5000 in Global Limits. You have the same set to 2500 in Organizational Limits.

A user comes up to you and presents a business need that requires him to be able to send a message to 3000 company employees at once.